"What Revolution?" The Outtakes, Part 1

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three

For your reading pleasure, remnants from the cutting-room floor from an essay I just wrote for All About Beer magazine, titled "What Revolution?" In it, I argue that craft brewing is just one part of the marvel that is the American beer industry. It will likely never become mainstream, but it's as much a part of who we are as the Establishment brewers. For more background to this three-parter, see this entry.

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[The inhabitants of the] house of American brewing . . . range from giant foreign-owned corporations to chain restaurants that use beer as a marketing niche; from thriving family-owned businesses to hanging-by-a-thread brewpubs that exist only because the owner, a happy homebrewer, wanted to make more beer than he or she could drink alone.

The five or six percent of beer drinkers who keep Ken Grossman, Greg Koch, and Vinnie Cilurzo in business are but a fragment of a sprawling, anything-not-bolted-down beer culture that is today, as it was in 1979, as much about “America” as it is about beer.

The late Michael Jackson unintentionally affirmed this view in an essay he wrote for AAB nine years after the magazine’s launch and a decade into the “real beer revolution.” Jackson observed that most Americans could only name three, maybe four, beers.

There’s Bud . . . (longish pause) . . . there’s Miller Lite . . . (even longer pause) . . . Do they still make Schlitz? (*1)

The problem, he argued, was that the bottomless “pocketbooks” of the Big Six (at that time A-B, Miller, Stroh, Heileman, Coors, and Pabst) enabled them to “dominate the advertising scene” and thereby obscure consumers’ awareness of brewing’s lager-, porter-, and ale-stuffed nooks and crannies. This “public ignorance” posed an “acute problem” for craft brewing.

“No small brewery is itself an island,” he reminded readers. “None can succeed for long unless the . . . idea of small breweries is understood and appreciated by the consumer.”

He was wrong. Thirty years in, most Americans don’t know about or drink craft beer, and yet craft brewing is alive and well. That’s because in America, ingenuity and creativity will always find an audience. Today’s Big Two dominate beer sales and advertising, but they have not stopped craft brewing’s forward momentum.

Nor, despite Jackson’s assertion, do we Americans crave “small” or “local,” unless, of course, the “small” and “local” is everywhere we want to be. Beer geeks cheer at the news that Groovy Craft Brewing of California is expanding production --- and shipping its beer three thousand miles to the other side of the country. In America, the virtues of small and local are in the eyes of the beholder.

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Source: Michael Jackson, “Jackson’s Journal: Beers of America Stand Up and Be Counted,” All About Beer 9, no. 1 (April 1988): 14.

How's About Some Outtakes?

Hey, the Great American Beer Festival starts tomorrow. My beer buddies are arriving in Denver even as I type this. They are; I'm not. But how 'bout I mark the occasion anyway?

Last January, Daniel Bradford, the publisher of All About Beer magazine, asked me to write an essay for the magazine's 30th anniversary issue. He wanted me to look back at the past thirty years of American beer and writing something "controversial," as he put it. Something that would get people talking.

Frankly, I wasn't sure I had new or novel to say, but I thought about it. Realized that, yes, I did want to say something. So I agreed, and cranked out my 4,000 words.

Daniel was taken aback; it was a bit . . . too, ummm, out in left field.

So he decided run it with a companion essay by AAB's editor, Julie Johnson. In order to fit both essays into the allotted pages, I sliced my essay by half.

Which means --- you guessed it --- outtakes! So I'm going to post a chunk of what got deleted, running it in three parts (it's long). Just in time for the start of the fun in Denver.

Oh: almost forgot. The magazine is now on sale, at newstands. (Sorry, it's not online, so if you want to read the whole thing, you'll have to, ya know, plunk down some dough.) So, next up at the blog: three easy pieces.

Another Update on Jack McAuliffe

For those of you who are following along: Jack is now in San Antonio, living with family. Good news, that, because he can't quite live on his own yet. As near as I can tell, he's back to his usual feisty self (at least based on several e-mails I've had from him recently). Bare minimum, he's sick of people fussing over him (not, ahem, that anyone plans to stop doing so). He told me he wants to have a t-shirt printed that says

Thanks for your concern, but I'm not disabled- I'm just crippled.

Anyway . . . He has a ways to go before he's fully recovered, but he's doing okay.

New[ish] Book on Beer Science

This one got by me. Sounds like a good read for the beer geeks among us.

One Other Point About Anti-Trust and Beer

Not that I'm inclined to go into a long historical disquisition on this but . . . Regarding anti-trust, beer, etc. (because that loony "news" piece is still floating around the internet), it's worth elaborating a bit on the results of anti-trust prosecutions in the 1960s and 1970s. (By the way, the "new" version now appearing at Slate's The Big Money is just a slightly longer version of the piece that  originally appeared in the New York Times.)

At the time, the federal government took action against beermakers, most notably Schlitz and Anheuser-Busch, when those companies tried to buy other beer companies, or when they wanted to buy brewing plants. (Eg, sometimes a company was already out of business and the one brewer simply wanted to buy the actual brewhouse, the facility.)

These properties mostly consisted of older plants with outdated or dilapidated equipment. In almost every case, the government refused to allow the acquistions. So Schlitz and A-B made their only logical, and legal, move: They invested in NEW brewing facilities. Schlitz, for example, spent millions and millions of dollars building ultra-efficient, state-of-the-art brewing plants.

No surprise, as a result both Schlitz and A-B were able to reduce their production costs and brew more beer at a lower price. Which, ya know, allowed them to gain a market advantage.

Again, there was nothing illegal about their moves, and it was the ONLY option left to them, given the anti-trust policy at the time. (Well, okay, they had another option: maintain the status quo, or, put another way, not grow any larger.)

For what it's worth.

Correction on Imported Beer Numbers c. 1984

Okey dokey. This is what I get for being lazy (see comment from me on earlier post.) Regarding the (recent) history of imported beer in the U.S: I was wrong in my earlier post. Here are some accurate numbers (and thanks again to Jess for calling me out on this): In 1983 (close enough to 1984, right?), import beers accounted for just under three percent of total sales in the United States.

What I misremembered was the growth rate, as opposed to the share of total beer sales. Starting in the 1950s, sales of imports rose year after year, often as much as nine or ten percent at a time when domestic sales were either stagnant or rose only a half percent or so. In 1982, for example, import sales rose 10.2% higher than in 1981.

It has to be the special mental attitude of the consumer of imported beers," noted the president of Grolsch Importers, Inc.. (*1)

He was feeling good about the world: sales of Grolsch had soared 20% in 1982. Sales of Heinken, in contrast, had only gone up eleven percent. No small beer, that number: Heinken had commandeered more than 40% of the American import market. Prosit!

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*1: Ross Heuer, "'82 Was Another Growth Year for the Leading Imports," Brewers Digest 58, no. 3 (March 1983): 12.